Yesterday I covered the new CustomScript extension for the VM Agent and in today's post we'll continue on the VM Agent topic. The VM Agent was introduced a few weeks ago with support to install it when deploying a new machine. But you've probably been thinking, what about my old machines?

Manual Installation

The VM Agent can be downloaded here as an MSI file. Which means you can simply download it on on your VM and run the installer:

That's it for installing the VM Agent. And now you can start playing with the BGInfo extension, the CustomScript extension, … This will work fine if you're only managing a few Virtual Machines, but I doubt you'll want to do this if you're running a large farm.

Automated Installation

The alternative would be to automate the installation using Remote PowerShell. I created the following script that does exactly that for you: it connects to the VM, downloads the installer and installs the VM Agent. Calling the script is simple: